Google’s feature creep

Microsoft used to be considered the king of feature creep. Here was Microsoft Word when it was most cluttered:

I don’t use any of Microsoft’s software anymore, but from what I hear they’ve toned down the feature creep a lot in recent versions of Windows and Word.

Google has been adding so many new features to its results page, they are starting to feel like the new Microsoft. Here’s an approximation of what Google used to look like (I couldn’t find an image of actual Google 1998 SRPs — anyone have one?)

And here is Google today:

Options on the left, ads on top and on the right, news results up top, images, and buttons to vote results up/down and annotate them. But worst of all are the new scrolling “real time” results. The static image I’ve embedded doesn’t do justice to how annoying this is. Random, out-of-context, and mostly asinine fragments of conversations scrolling by. I think it might be Google’s Clippy.